Business Day
*Grabouw's seasonal fruit-pickers reap bitter harvest of discontent* *Carol Paton, Business Day, Johannesburg, 30 March 2012 *GRABOUW, the Western Cape town that was last week torn apart by racial violence, is an old and easy migration destination for unskilled migrant workers from the Eastern Cape.
Far from being "refugees", as Western Cape Premier Helen Zille described them, Grabouw's burgeoning Xhosa-speaking population are migrant workers, many fetched directly from their villages --- just as they were 50 years ago --- and transported into the area by fruit farmers who need cheap labour.
But while 50 years ago apartheid policies made sure African workers were trucked out again at the end of the fruit-picking season, now workers are free to stay when work on the farms ends, and thousands do.
The result has been the mushrooming settlements around the town. At the time of the last census in 2001, the population of Grabouw was a little over 21500. Now, while nobody has a definitive number, there are an estimated 30000 shacks, built out of the wood planks of apple crates and insulated with plastic, and a population of at least 50000 people.
There can be no doubt that what lit the spark that set off last Monday's frightening violence, was aggressive political campaigning by both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), which are soon to fight a by-election in the area. In its ugliest manifestation, two African men were beaten and stoned by a coloured mob, school classrooms in both African and coloured areas were burned, and vitriolic racial abuse was hurled.
Both parties in the election have used implicit and sometimes explicit racial mobilisation, although both deny it. However, the escalation of fear and paranoia that led to the racial confrontation last Monday could only have been possible in a community under stress, brought about by fierce competition over public resources.
Despite the growing army of labour on their doorstep, fruit farmers in the area have maintained their age-old practice of hiring people from Eastern Cape villages, using labour brokers or their own networks to fetch them in trucks or taxis.
Because farm work is hard and the pay is low, it is seen as a stepping stone. Few are keen to do the same work for a second or third season. Says local farmer James Rawbone-Viljoen: "People use the opportunity of a farm job to get down here. A lot arrive and before they've even spent a day in your employ, they're gone.
"In a season, to get my 100 workers, I bring down about 160 people. People are not really willing to work on farms. So we've got to recruit every year for crunch time."
Better paid and more desirable than picking fruit is finding work in the big fruit pack houses. Labour broker Imvusa Recruitment Company, which recruits for the pack houses, says compared with farm work, where the minimum wage is R63 a day (more can be earned by picking longer and faster), work here can fetch R114 a day.
But it is the continual recruitment by farmers that keeps up the steady flow of newcomers into town, Imvusa manager Estelle Williams says.
"Every year there are new people here. People who work in the orchards at first, then look for work in the packing houses. They get wise and won't continue to work for R60," she says.
"Six years ago there wasn't an 'Iraq' or a 'Beverly Hills' in Grabouw," says Ms Williams, referring to some of the informal settlements that have grown up around the town.
But although many of the residents of Grabouw's informal settlements raise their "reservation wage" --- or the sum they are prepared to work for --- quite quickly on arriving in town, most live in depressed poverty.
Inside Iraq, a collection of about 100 shacks on a sandy hillside out of town, two old Xhosa men sit outside a small hovel. The meagreness of the homestead is sad, the poverty is ugly. Both men have been here for close to 20 years, arriving just as people still do, on a truck provided by a farmer. They will go back to the Eastern Cape "one day", they say, although they can't say when.
A fresh-faced young girl, with a baby on her back, arrives to join the conversation. She is a schoolgirl at the only Xhosa-speaking school in town. It is this school, Umyezo Wama Apile, that has been at the centre of controversy in recent weeks.
Originally built as a hostel for Eskom workers, the building was converted into a school almost 20 years ago, to accommodate the growing number of Xhosa residents in the town. Its capacity was for 600 pupils from Grade R to matric. Last year numbers had reached 1300 and at the start of this year another 600 unregistered children arrived.
The schoolgirl, Akhona Mankonkwana, is also from the Eastern Cape and came to Grabouw to join her mother, who has work packing cut flowers. School has been closed for two weeks following the upheaval and she is taking care of her sister's baby.
She is lively and intelligent, and is bursting with ambition and the energy of youth.
But her prospects for learning are poor.Apart from the chronic overcrowding, school has been constantly disrupted since the start of the year. Two classrooms were recently burned and many had their windows smashed by members of the community determined to make the point that they will no longer be ignored by the education authorities. In general, the building is in a dilapidated state.
There are two other schools close by: an Afrikaans-medium primary and an Afrikaans high school, to which most of the coloured children go. Both are racially well integrated with at least 40% African students.
It is in this context, of a town where resources have been stretched to the limit, that two political parties --- each with an aggressive campaign stance and broadly, although not exactly, defined along racial lines --- have embarked on an intense competition for votes.
For the ANC, determined to win back control in the Western Cape, ward by ward, Grabouw is one of several small-town targets. In elections last May, the DA won 12 of Grabouw's 14 wards, one of which is the one in which Umyezo school stands. This ward was won by a prominent community leader, Catherine Booysen-Nefdt, a longstanding ANC member who left the party and stood for the DA.
Last month, Ms Booysen-Nefdt reconsidered her choice, complaining that the DA-led Theewaterskloof council was racially biased. While money could always be found to fix things white voters complained about, like the smell emanating from the sewage works, there were never enough resources to make the lives of black people any better.
The DA claims Ms Booysen-Nefdt was wined and dined and bribed by ANC provincial leaders but Ms Booysen-Nefdt denies it. "I felt like a rubber stamp," she says. "We were there to show the community that the DA has black support. But even though I was put on the mayoral committee, I still couldn't change anything."
Like many other people who have lived in Grabouw for a long time, Ms Booysen-Nefdt's racial origins are not what they seem. Born to Xhosa parents in the 1970s, her family presented themselves as coloured, using the surname of her grandmother, in order to be allowed to stay in the Western Cape, then a "coloured labour preference" area.
Her father, originally a seasonal worker from the Eastern Cape, established a foothold on the farms in the 1950s and eventually became a supervisor and labour recruiter, taking trucks into the rural Transkei to seek out fruit pickers for the farms.
Ms Booysen-Nefdt's return to the ANC has precipitated a by-election in her ward, resulting in both parties moving into a full mobilisation state.
The DA's tack, as it frequently is in minority communities, is: "Make sure the ANC doesn't take control of your ward." This has been accompanied by SMSes to voters to "defend what we have" in the face of attempts by others to destroy it.
On the ANC side things have been revved up by a particularly reckless member of the ANC-aligned civic organisation, John Michaels, who has stirred up emotions over the school overcrowding, exploiting the slowness of the DA education authorities to remedy the situation.
Last Monday's trouble really got going on the eve of a march organised by Mr Michaels to protest over the school.
To mobilise people to support the next day's "strike", Mr Michaels and others set up burning barricades and went around the community with loud hailers. In the mayhem, a book room in the coloured high school was set alight and some classrooms were vandalised.
The "attack" on the school caused panic among the parents, chiefly although not exclusively coloured. By the morning they had flocked to the school amid panic that it would be burned.
ANC regional chairman Manie Damon insists that "there was no plan to burn any school" and the legal march was simply going down its expected route.
It was where the marchers made contact with the parents who had surrounded the entry roads to the school that the fighting broke out.
After a day of running battles, in which the ANC accused police of siding with "coloured thugs" and the DA denied its intention was anything other than to "defend their school", both sides are angry and deeply hurt.
The government --- at all levels --- has since been propelled into action to solve the problem of the school: a temporary Xhosa high school will be established at the start of next term, and a new school will be built in 2014.
But the panic and the anger have not subsided.Rumours abound. There was hysteria again this week, when coloured parents flocked to the primary school "to protect it", only to find that no one was coming to attack.
African parents are angry that the DA administration has taken so long to take them seriously. Mr Damon says the previous ANC provincial administration promised them a school, but the DA administration has not followed through with the plan. "To me, that can only be political," he says.
The by-election date is set for April 25. Leaders from both the ANC and the DA are insistent they are acting to calm racial tension, having seen how easily political mobilisation can slide out of control. But tempers are less easily calmed on the ground and hard-core political supporters from both sides harbour suspicion and resentment.
Grabouw will in any event continue to grow as its local economy draws cheap migrant labour from further and further afield. Growing numbers of unemployed will crowd into its desperate shack settlements, shunning work on the farms, in the hope of something that can earn them a few rand more.
*From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=168666* ** ** ** -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
<<inline: BusinessDay.gif>>
